Data Driven

One of the biggest difficulties I’ve had so far with our project is coordinating the data we have with the story we want to tell. With the projects I had done previously everything fit together easily but our website has proved a bit more challenging. I’ve been working with our music visualization. Before we even began we had to tweak our original idea, and we had to change direction again after we had gathered the data. Ethan told us time and time again to make sure that our visualizations were data-driven but the message hadn’t quite sunk into until I was fighting with data that couldn’t do what we wanted it to. Coming up with ideas was easy but wrangling data was much more difficult. Additionally, while two weeks seemed like a lot of time at the beginning of the field school the time passed quickly once we actually began working. I had anticipated that the most difficult part of this project would be the actual nuts and bolts of the coding, but now I would say that synching our ideas with the data was most difficult. While figuring out the technical side of things can be quite difficult too, it’s also more straightforward. When you have code that’s not working, you do though and debug. If you can’t get a feature to work, you find out another way to do it. But if the data isn’t there, there’s nothing you can do. Without the time or resources to research something yourself, you’re limited to what others have and what you can gain access to.